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asyncscrumon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

Mostly about enterprise saas product leadership and the intersection with sales.

asyncscrumon The 1986 Paris-Dakar rally (2021)

> Baron fell into a coma, from which he never awoke. He passed in 2010.

I hadn't known that Baron was in a coma for 24 years after this.

asyncscrumon “Laws” of software estimation for complex work (2021)

The most important takeaway here is that the customer is willing to negotiate timing and scope. The 12wk plan was actually 1yr and the author is still around to write this.

If your colleagues claim the sky is falling because a software development timeline was wrong, they're not cut out for software development.

asyncscrumon Software horror show: SAP Concur

My favorite fight search tool was hipmunk. Their 'agony' sort was my favorite feature in any software ever. SAP bought them, and I was so hopeful that Concur would bake this into their god awful app that I had to use for work. No luck. RIP Hipmunk.

asyncscrumon Ask HN: How do you prioritize Job offers by money and interest?

Usually I determine the money range required to live the lifestyle I want. Once competing offers hit that threshold, then I take money off the table as a evaluation criteria.

Usually it comes down to a single question for me. How likely is it that this job ruins a family vacation? I've had that too many times, and I'm not doing that anymore. If I catch at least a hint of that likelihood, I'm out. Quality of life outside of work is the most important for me right now.

asyncscrumon I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

Worked at a company that had a business line offering a professional service to saas firms. We got into the saas game ourselves and leaned on our existing customers to analyze their calls. I was the 'machine' in our machine learning lol.

asyncscrumon I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

One on my major takeaways from the calls was how many people were visibly sick yet still working and getting on calls. WFH has really destroyed the concept of stay home and get some rest.

asyncscrumon I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

It basically refers to data in salesforce being complete, accurate and input in a consistent way. It's a term used around software apps that drive decision making and are useless without the criteria I mentioned.

asyncscrumon I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

At companies that are very customer centric, often times the calls are shared with customer success and implementation teams ensuring your goals as expressed during the buying phase are aligned with the implementation. This allows shorter implementation timeframes and higher likelihood of you achieving your goals and having a positive impact on your company. However, I'm sure that the majority of time the recordings sit in cloud cold storage until they expire and are deleted, never to be heard again.

asyncscrumon I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

True, will update the article. I still found it somewhat surprising.

asyncscrumon I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

This is a good question. Regarding letting customers talk, the teams that were most successful had great salesforce hygiene, and teams with great salesforce hygiene were required to fill in certain data points. This means that there are commonly asking questions and listening more than talking. Likely they were evaluated as sales representatives based on the quality of the data that they provided in salesforce as well as quota attainment. Overall I think the act of listening and asking questions versus delivering a script means you're qualifying your leads more appropriately and they're just better candidates for purchase.

asyncscrumon Using machine learning to predict the leads that close

Thus spawning a whole new class of tools that add a more convenient interface on-top of salesforce.

asyncscrumon Lessons from a Professional Password Cracker

The rockyou.com insight was new to me. I hadn't heard of this breach somehow. I was wondering how they had 32m users and read some more on Wikipedia and they had Facebook apps and some MySpace plugins.

From Wikipedia

> In December 2009, RockYou experienced a data breach resulting in the exposure of over 32 million user accounts. This resulted from storing user data in an unencrypted database (including user passwords in plain text instead of using a cryptographic hash) and not patching a ten-year-old SQL vulnerability. RockYou failed to provide a notification of the breach to users and miscommunicated the extent of the breach

asyncscrumon Digger – Back and Digitally Remastered (1998)

Worked for the company that made this game many many years after they got out of gaming. For years we got calls about it. Sometimes licenced it to other developers for nothing. We had some cool Japanese packaging and artwork from that era. The guy that did the sound turned into a great .net dev and we built several cool products together that ran for 15 years without maintenance.

asyncscrumon As the old guy at a startup

Next stop, tiktok!

asyncscrumon As the old guy at a startup

OP here, yes with a big team with established processes and a backlog that hundreds might be in love with, proceed with caution. And honestly, this is only to protect other people's sentimental value with the content. The lost time spent on backlogs with reviewing, reporting out, re-evaluating, migrating, reading between the lines, and other grooming, far out ways the handful of times you leverage it. This is an extension of the 'build trap' I feel, where we're convinced that we need to coddle the things that we might build.

In my experience, the things that get built that actually have impact are always recent realizations, not things that have been sitting in a backlog for a year.

asyncscrumon Ask HN: Why Blog at All?

I only recently restarted a blog after a decade hiatus. For me there's two reasons:

1. Catharsis. Work and life is often excruciating and it's calming to organize your thoughts about a subject.

2. To see if people relate. Sometimes your journey is lonely and painful and seems unique to oneself. By posting blogs on this site, I've discovered that I'm not even close to being alone. The Internet is a wonderful place.

asyncscrumon Ask HN: Hybrid/Remote software team rituals

...and we only do it if all tests are green, obviously.

I picture the collective hackernews nodding in unison, muttering 'obviously.'

asyncscrumon Your competitor wrote the RFP you're bidding on

This is 100% true. The bigger the deal value, the less delegation there is. Often times, if it's like a top 10 account, the CEO shows up and is heavily involved in the presentation layer.

asyncscrumon Your competitor wrote the RFP you're bidding on

Yes this is also an additional gotcha that makes this process an even deeper quagmire.

asyncscrumon Ask HN: What are other app stores to develop for?

I can add a few:

Intercom

Salesforce

Atlassian

Chrome store

Gong

MS Teams

Service Now

Adalo (sort of, a react component library)

asyncscrumon Mourning loss as a remote team

Breaking the news is so hard. Sorry about your colleague. This sounds pretty rough.

asyncscrumon Mourning loss as a remote team

Thanks for this. Sorry to hear about your losses. HN has been very kind today and it's been cathartic to read all of these stories.

asyncscrumon Mourning loss as a remote team

It's inside a b2b enterprise app with ~50k mau. However that would have been a fitting blog path. But his name wasn't actually Pete

asyncscrumon Mourning loss as a remote team

Am OP, can speak to the lack of cameras. We actually crafted our process in the Microsoft Lync era. Video was brutal. Also because of the diverse accents (Vietnamese, Portuguese, Russian, Scottish) it was easier to 'listen' without distraction. Obviously if you were starting today, cameras would be on. As you pointed out, probably a mistake.

asyncscrumon On Being Indispensable

I actually took 3 months off and completely disconnected. A large portion of my direct team churned while I was off, a long time engineer took his own life, and I came back to the same issues but magnified.

Overall, it's not unreasonable to assume I'm a control freak and couldn't let projects go. However I'm a big proponent of letting fires burn and I delegate to no end. My particular type of stuck was exasperated by a corporate culture that has sales quotas pulled out of the air and implementation that was tracking time down to the minute because 90% had to be billable. In that culture there's no incentive or ability for individuals to learn.

asyncscrumon Meta’s NPE Team launches a new tasks app, Move, for group organization and todos

Their website https://movetasks.app/ has been broken for days.

asyncscrumon Barcode Detection API

Used this in a b2b saas for a few years. Worked well and helped remove complexity in a previous way we did it that relied on a native app called pic2shop. We lost a bit of functionality specifically a clear target zone, green scanning line and better low light support. It made up for it in ease of support and reduction in perceived jank.

asyncscrumon Ask HN: Has remote work made you move to a new location or consider it?

Was remote before COVID, but pandemic madness and home prices in Toronto had me itching to get out. After 25 years in Toronto I moved 3.5hr drive North to a beautiful city with gigabit internet, lakes and wilderness. I got a house more than twice as big for 1/3 the price of what I sold for.

Because of the reduction in personal burn rate, I was able to leave my soul sucking job and join a tiny startup to get back to my roots.

It's hard to make friends as an adult during COVID, so there's times when it's lonely for sure.